Q: Professor Habermas, let me begin by congratulating
you on receiving the Prince of Asturias Prize and also the gold medal
of the Bellas Artes Foundation of Madrid. You must have surprised many
Spaniards, as you did me, when you confessed your admiration for two
fiercely existentialist writers, Miguel de Unamuno and Miguel de
Cervantes.

A: This love goes back to school days and my university
years. After the Second World War, when the Keller Theater was
presenting masterful productions of French plays by Sartre, Mauriac
and Claudel, Existentialism gave expression to our sense of life. A
book by the Tuebingen philosopher, Friedrich Bollnow – who would now
be 100, like Adorno – brought Unamuno’s Don Quixote to my
attention at that time. By similar paths, I also found my way to
Kierkegaard, to the later Schelling, and to the Heidegger of Being
and Time. That I turned my back on Being and Time, and
busied myself, rather, with social-, political-, and legal theory, had
one simple reason: In the rather tattered mental and moral world of
the Bundesrepublik, one could grapple better with what Jaspers
called “limit situations” in the language of Marx and Dewey than in
the “jargon of authenticity.”

Q: To get back to the occasion of the prize, could
you comment on the fact that Susan Sontag, Gustavo Gutierrez and
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio da Silva, all distinctly figures of
the Left, and loudly outspoken opponents of the war in Iraq, were
among the prize winners?

A: This prize enjoys an astonishingly high profile in
the Spanish-speaking world. On reflection, the coincidence might just
be an accident. Anyway, the street demonstrations in Spain against
Aznar’s Iraq policy were even more overwhelming than in the other
European countries.

Q: You, too, were very critical of the American-lead
war in Afghanistan and Iraq. But during the Kosovo crisis, you
supported the same unilateralism, and justified a form of “military
humanism,” to use Chomsky’s expression. How are these cases different
– Iraq and Afghanistan on the one hand, and Kosovo on the other?

A: Concerning the intervention in Afghanistan, in an
interview with Giovanna Borradori, I expressed myself with some
reservation: After September 11th, the Taliban regime
refused to renounce unambiguously its support of the terrorism of
Al-Qaeda. Up to this point, international law has not been tailored
for such situations. The objections which I had at the time were not,
as with the Iraqi campaign, of a legal nature. Quite apart from the
lying maneuvers of the current U.S. administration which have lately
come to light, the recent Gulf War represents, on the part of
Bush, since September 2002, a patent threat to the United Nations and
a violation of international law. Neither one of the two preconditions
existed which could have justified such an intervention: There was
neither an appropriate resolution of the Security Council, nor was an
attack imminent on the part of Iraq. It counts for nothing whether
weapons of mass destruction might still be found or not. For a
preventive attack, there is no retroactive justification: No one may
go to war on a suspicion.

Here you see the difference with the
situation in Kosovo, when the West had to decide, in light of
the accumulated experiences of the Bosnian War – think of the disaster
of Srebenica! – if it wanted to watch yet more ethnic cleansing by
Milosevic, or if it wanted, in the absence of national interest, to
intervene. Granted, the Security Council was blocked. Just the same,
there were two grounds for legitimating action—one formal, the other
informal—even though the U.N. Charter does not permit any substitute
for the required consent of the Security Council: For the first, one
may appeal to the obligatio erga omnes, binding on all states,
the call for emergency assistance in the case of a threatened
genocide, which, in any event, is firmly established in customary
international law. For the other, one may place on the scale the
fact that NATO is an alliance made up of liberal states, whose
organizing principles comport with the principles of the UN’s
Declaration of Human Rights. Compare this with the “coalition of the
willing,” which has split the West, and included states in contempt of
human rights, such as Uzbekistan and Taylor’s Liberia.

Just as important is the perspective
of the Continental European countries like France, Italy and Germany,
which served to justify, at the time, their participation in the
Kosovo intervention. In expectation of eventual ratification by the
Security Council, these countries understood this intervention as an
“anticipation”of an effective law of world citizenship - as a step
along the path from classical international law to what Kant
envisioned as the “status of world citizen” which would afford legal
protection to citizens against their own criminal regimes. Already at
that time (in an article for the April 29, 1999 issue of “Die Zeit”),
I had posited a characteristic difference between the Continental
European and the Anglo-American: “It is one thing for the U.S.A. to
employ, in the course of what is also an admirable political
tradition, human rights instrumentally as surety of a hegemonic order.
It is another thing if we understand the precarious transition, from
classical power politics to the state of world citizenship, as a
learning process to be mastered collectively. This more comprehensive
perspective requires greater caution. The self-empowerment of NATO
should not become the rule.”

Q: On May 31st, you and Derrida published
a kind of manifesto with the title: “The 15th of February,
or: What Binds the Europeans. – A Plea for a Common Foreign
Policy—First of all, in Core-Europe.” In a foreword, Derrida explains
that he subscribes to the article that you wrote. How is it that two
intellectual heavyweights, who for the last two decades have regarded
each other suspiciously from across the Rhine, and who have been—as
some insist—talking past each other, suddenly so well understand each
other, as to publish, together, so important a document? Is it simply
“politics,” or is the text you both have signed also a “philosophical
gesture”? An amnesty, a truce, a reconciliation, a philosophical gift?

A: I haven’t a clue what Derrida would say in answer to
your question. To my taste, you have pitched the thing too high with
these formulations. First of all, this was concerned with a political
statement in which Derrida and I were in agreement—as has often been
the case lately, by the way. After the formal conclusion of the Iraq
war, when many were fearing a general prostration of the “unwilling”
governments before Bush, I had sent a letter to Derrida—as well as to
Eco, Muschg, Rorty, Savater and Vattimo—inviting them to participate
in a common initiative. (Paul Ricoeur was the only one who preferred
to hold back because of political considerations; Eric Hobsbawm and
Harry Mulisch could not participate for personal reasons.) Now,
Derrida was not able to write, at this time, his own article, as he
was obliged to be undergoing unpleasant medical tests. But Derrida
wanted very much to be part of this, and suggested the procedure which
we then followed. I was happy about this. We had last met in New York
after September 11th. We had already been recording our
philosophical discussion for some years, in Evanston, in Paris and in
Frankfurt. So no grand gesture was now required.

When he received the Adorno Prize,
Derrida, for his part, gave a highly sensible speech in the
Paulskirche in Frankfurt, in which the spiritual affinity of these two
minds was impressively manifested. This kind of thing leaves one not
unmoved. Actually, over and beyond all the politics, what connects me
to Derrida is the philosophical reference to an author like Kant.
Admittedly – and though we’re roughly the same age, our life histories
have been very different – what separates us is the later Heidegger.
Derrida’s thinking has appropriated the Jewish-inspired perceptions of
a Levinas. In Heidegger, I confront a philosopher who failed as a
citizen – in 1933 and especially after 1945. But even as a
philosopher, he is suspect to me because, in the 1930s, he received
Nietzsche precisely as a neo-pagan, as it was then the fashion to do.
Unlike Derrida, whose reading of “Andenken” accords with the spirit of
monotheistic tradition, I take Heidegger’s botch-job “Seinsdenken” as
a leveling of that epochal threshold in the history of consciousness
that Jaspers had called the “axial age.” According to my
understanding, Heidegger committed treason against that caesura which
is marked, in various ways, by the prophetic-awakening Word from Mount
Sinai, and by the Enlightenment of a Socrates.

When Derrida and I mutually understand
our so different background motives, a difference of interpretation
must not be taken as a difference in the thing being interpreted. Be
that as it may, “truce” or “reconciliation” are not really the proper
expressions for a friendly and open-minded interchange.

Q: Why have you entitled this essay “The 15th
of February”, and not, as some American might have proposed “The 11th
of September”, or “The 9th of April”? Was February 15th
the world-historical answer to September 11th – rather than to the
campaigns against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein?

A: This is reading too much into it. The editors at the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung had actually published the
article under the headline “Our Renewal. After the War: The Rebirth of
Europe.” Perhaps they wanted to downplay the importance of the
demonstrations of February 15th. Allusion to this date
would have reminded one that, in cities such as London, Madrid and
Barcelona, Rome, Berlin and Paris, demonstrations had taken place that
were bigger than any since the end of the Second World War. These
demonstrations were not an answer to the attack of September 11th,
which had immediately moved the Europeans to such impressive
manifestations of solidarity. The demonstrations gave voice to the
infuriated, powerless outrage of a highly diverse mass of citizens,
many of whom had never before gone out into the streets. The anti-war
appeal was directed unambiguously against the dishonest and illegal
policies of certain of the allied governments. I regard this massive
protest to be no more “anti-American” than our Vietnam protests had
been in their day - with the sorry difference that, between 1965 and
1970, we only had to add our protests to the formidable protests that
were happening in America itself. So I was glad that my friend Richard
Rorty spontaneously joined in the intellectuals’ initiative of May 31st
with an article that was, in fact, politically and theoretically, the
sharpest.

Q: Let’s stay with the original title that had called
for a common European foreign policy “ beginning in the center of
Europe.” This a little like saying there’s a center and a periphery –
some who are essential, and some who are not. For some, this was an
eerie echo of Rumsfeld’s distinction between the old and the new
Europe. I am certain that the ascription of any such family
resemblance gives you and Derrida a headache. You have been
energetically in favor of a constitution for the European Union in
which such gradations of space and geography should have no place.
What do you mean by “Core-Europe”?

A: “Center of Europe [Kerneuropa]” is, first of all, a
technical expression, brought into play at the start of the 1990s by
Schaeuble and Lamers, foreign policy experts of the CDU, at a moment
in time when the process of European unification had still to
solidify; it was intended to recall the vanguard role played by the
six original members of the European Community. Then as now, France,
the Benelux countries, Italy and Germany turn out to be the driving
force behind the “deepening”of EU institutions. Meanwhile, at the
summit in Nice of EU heads of government, it was officially decided
there would be a provision for a “strengthened cooperation”of
particular member states in particular political spheres. This
mechanism goes by the name of “structured cooperation” in the draft
European Constitution. Germany, France, Luxemburg, Belgium, and
lately, even Great Britain, are making use of this provision for the
common building-up of Europe’s own armed forces. The US administration
is exerting what is, admittedly, considerable pressure on Great
Britain to forestall the establishment of a European headquarters,
though it would still be associated with NATO. To this extent,
therefore, “Core-Europe” is already a reality.

On the other hand, today, in a Europe
deliberately divided and weakened by Rumsfeld and his underwriters,
the term has its appeal. The idea of a common foreign- and defense
policy emanating from the center of Europe arouses anxieties in a
situation where the European Union, after its extension eastward, is
barely governable, and it is especially anxiety-producing in countries
which, for good and sufficient historical reasons, are resistant to
further integration. Some member-states want to hold onto a national
scope of action. They are more interested in the existing,
predominantly inter-governmental mode of decision making, than in
extending the jurisdiction of majority-rule supra-national
institutions over an ever-greater range of political actions. Thus you
see the newly admitted East-Central European nations concerned for
their newly-achieved national sovereignty, and Great Britain
frightened for its “special relationship” with the USA.

America’s divisive policy found
willing helpers in Aznar and Blair. This chutzpah struck at the
long-latent European fault-line separating the integrationists and
their opponents. “Core-Europe” is an answer to both: to the
smouldering intra-European controversy over the “finality” of the
unification process, which is wholly independent of the war in Iraq,
as well as to the current stimulation of that opposition, which has
its origin outside Europe. The reactions to the catch-phrase
“Core-Europe” are all the more nervous the more external and internal
pressures invite this answer. The hegemonic unilateralism of the US
administration has thrown down the challenge to Europe to learn,
finally, how to speak foreign policy with one voice. But in face of
the frustrated deepening of the European Union, we can learn to make a
start if, first of all, we begin at the center.

France and Germany, many times over
the course of decades, have undertaken this role. Precedence does not
mean exclusion. The door stands open to all. The harsh criticism which
Great Britain and the East-Central European countries, above all, have
leveled at our initiative, is also explained, of course, by the push
which a common foreign-and-defense policy has received from the
provocative and favorably-timed opposition of the overwhelming
majority of the population of all of Europe to Bush’s adventure
in Iraq. I viewed this provocation, as it respected our May 31st
initiative, as most opportune. Unfortunately, no fruitful discussion
developed out of it.

Q: We know, of course, that the United States has
played “new” Europe against “old” even in the exercise of its
influence within NATO. Does the future of the European Union lie with
a weakening or with a strengthening of NATO? Should and can NATO be
replaced with something else?

A: NATO played a good part during the Cold War, and also
afterwards – even if it ought not again act alone, as when it
intervened in Kosovo. But if the United States views NATO less and
less as an alliance entailing obligations to consult, and more and
more unilaterally as a mere instrument for the furtherance of its own
national interests and world-power politics, then NATO has no future.
It may be NATO’s peculiar strength that “powerful military alliance”
does not exhaust its definition; rather, its military might comes
attached to a value-added dual legitimacy: NATO’s existence is
justified, as I see it, only by its being an alliance of indubitably
liberal states, acting in express conformity with the human rights
policies of the United Nations.

Q: “Americans are from Mars; Europeans are from
Venus,” Robert Kagan asserts in an essay, which has attracted much
attention on the part of the neo-conservative Straussians in the Bush
administration. One might view this essay, which was originally
entitled “Power and Weakness,” as a manifesto in which Bush’s national
defense policy is mapped out. Kagan distinguishes between Americans
and Europeans, calling the former “Hobbesians” and the latter
“Kantians.” Have the Europeans really entered the post-modern paradise
of Kant’s “perpetual peace,” while the Americans remain outside in the
Hobbesian world of power politics, standing watch upon the ramparts
that their European beneficiaries can not defend?

A: The philosophical comparison won’t take you far: Kant
was, in a certain sense, a true student of Hobbes; he described, in
any event, modern coercive law and the character of state sovereignty
as soberly as Hobbes did. The connection, splashy but inadequate and
misleading, which Kagan makes between these philosophical traditions
on the one hand, and those national mentalities and policies on the
other, should best be laid aside. Viewed long-range, what one may
perceive as the difference between the Anglo-American and the European
mentalities reflects long-term historical experiences; but I see no
correlation with short-term changes in political strategies.

In his attempt to separate the wolves
from the sheep, Kagan is alluding, of course, to certain facts: The
terror-regime of the Nazis was only brought down through the exercise
of military violence and through invasion. The Europeans were able,
during the Cold War, to build and extend their welfare states under
the nuclear umbrella of the US. In Europe, and especially in its
richly-populated middle, pacifist attitudes have proliferated. In the
meanwhile, the countries of Europe, with their comparatively slender
military budgets and poorly equipped armed forces, could oppose the
bone-crushing military might of the US only with empty words. Well,
Kagan’s caricatured interpretation of these facts provokes me to offer
these comments:

1.For the victory over Nazi-Germany, we have also to thank the
costly struggles of the Red Army;

2. Their social compact and
economic importance, features of a “soft,” non-militaristic power,
have given the Europeans an influence in global power relations not to
be underestimated;

3. In Germany today, as a
consequence, also, of American re-education, a welcome pacifism
reigns, which, however, did not prevent the Bundesrepublik from
participating in UN actions in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in Macedonia, in
Afghanistan, and lastly in the Horn of Africa;

4. It is the US, itself, who
wants to thwart the plans to build up a European military capability
independent of NATO.

This exchange of blows elevates the
matter to the false level of an altercation. What I take to be false
is Kagan’s stylization of US policy over the course of the last
century. The conflict between “realism” and “idealism” in foreign and
defense policy occurred, not between the continents, but, rather,
within American policy itself. Certainly, the bi-polar power structure
of the world between 1945 and 1989, compelled a policy of balance of
terror. The competition between the two nuclear-armed systems during
the Cold War created the background for the towering influence which
the “realist” school of international relations in Washington was able
wield. But we must not forget the impetus which President Wilson gave
to the founding of the League of Nations after the First World War,
nor the influence which American jurists and politicians themselves
exercised in Paris after the US retreated from the League. Without the
US, there would have been no Kellogg-Briand Pact, nor the first
international legal proscription of wars of aggression. But what fits
least in the militant picture of the role of the US that Kagan paints,
is the policy of the victors in 1945, initiated by Franklin D.
Roosevelt. What Roosevelt called for in his undelivered Jefferson Day
Address of April 11, 1945, was for the world to seek not only an “end
to war,” but an “end to the beginning of all wars.”

In that period, the US was at the peak
of the new internationalism, and spearheaded the initiative for the
creation of the United Nations, in San Francisco. The US was the
driving force behind the UN, which (no accident) has its headquarters
in New York. The US set in motion the first international human rights
convention, campaigned for the global monitoring of, as well as the
juridical and military prosecution of, human rights violations,
pressed upon the Europeans the idea of a political unification of
Europe—initially, against the opposition of the French. This period of
unexampled internationalism, loosed, in the ensuing decades, a wave of
innovations in the field of human rights, blocked, indeed, during the
Cold War, but implemented, in part, after 1989. As of that point in
time, it was yet to be decided if the one remaining superpower would
turn away from its leading role in the march toward a cosmopolitan
legal order, and fall back into the imperial role of a good hegemon
above international law.

George Bush, the father of the current
president, had—admittedly, vague—notions of world order, that were
different from his son’s. The unilateral action of the current
administration and the repute of its influential neo-conservative
members and advisors, reminds one, of course, of its precursors: the
repudiation of the climate treaty, the treaty on atomic, biological
and chemical weapons, the landmine convention, the protocols for the
agreement on so-called child-warriors, etc. But Kagan is suggesting a
false continuity. The newly-elected Bush administration’s definitive
repudiation of internationalism has remained its keynote: The
rejection of the (since established) International Criminal Court was
no trivial delict. One must not imagine that the offensive
marginalizing of the United Nations and the cavalier contempt for
international law which this administration has allowed itself to be
guilty of, represent the expression of some necessary constant of
American foreign policy. This administration, whose declared aim, to
attend to national interests, has so obviously missed its mark, can be
voted out of office. Why should it not be replaced in the coming year
by an administration that gives the lie to Kagan?

Q: In the United States, the “War on Terrorism” has
veered off into a “War on Civil Liberties,” poisoning the legal
infrastructure that makes a living democratic culture possible. The
Orwellian “Patriot Act” is a Pyrrhic victory in which we and our
democracy are the vanquished. Has the “War on Terrorism” similarly
affected the European Union? Or has its experience with the terrorism
of the 70s made it immune to the surrender of civil liberties to the
security-state?

A: I don’t actually believe that. In the
Bundesrepublik, the reactions in the autumn of ‘77 were hysterical
enough. Furthermore, we’re encountering today a different sort of
terrorism. I don’t know what would have happened if the twin towers
had collapsed in Berlin or Frankfurt. Naturally, we would not, after
September 11, have laced up for ourselves “security packets” so
suffocatingly tight, nor of such an unconstitutional reach, as the
frightening regulations in America, which have been so clearly
skewered and dissected by my friend Ronald Dworkin. If, in this
regard, distinctions were to be drawn between mentality and practice
here and beyond the Atlantic, I would endeavor to place them in the
context of historical experience. Maybe the very understandable shock
in the USA after September 11 was, in fact, greater than it would have
been in a European country accustomed to war. How to prove this?

Certainly, the patriotic upsurge
following upon September 11, had an American character. But the key to
the curtailment of fundamental law, which you’ve referred to, to the
breach of the Geneva Convention in Guantanamo, to the creation of the
Department of Homeland Security, etc., I would locate elsewhere. The
militarization of life domestically and abroad, the bellicose policies
which open themselves up to infection by their opponent’s own methods,
and which return the Hobbesian state to the world stage where the
globalization of markets had seemed to have driven the political into
the wings, all this the politically enlightened American populace
would have overwhelmingly rejected, if the administration had not,
with force, shameless propaganda, and manipulated insecurity,
exploited the shock of September 11. For a European observer and a
twice-shy child such as I, the systematic intimidation and
indoctrination of the population and the restrictions on the scope of
permitted opinion in the months of October and November of 2002, (when
I was in Chicago), were unnerving. This was not “my” America. From my
16th year onward, my political thinking, thanks to the
sensible re-education policy of the Occupation, has been nourished by
the American ideals of the late 18th century.

Q: In your keynote address to the Philosophical World
Congress during August of 2003 in Istanbul, you said that
international security, under the conditions prevailing in
post-national configurations, is being threatened in new ways and from
three sides: By international terrorism, by criminal states, and by
certain new civil wars arising in failed states. What interests me
particularly is this: Is terrorism something that democratic states
can declare war on?

A: Whether democratic or not, a state can normally only
make “war” on another state, if the word is to have a precise meaning.
When a government, for example, deploys military force against an
insurrection, the means do indeed suggest a war, but this force is
fulfilling another function—the state is concerned for tranquility and
order within its own territorial borders, in circumstances when the
police organs will no longer suffice. Now, when this attempt at
enforced peace misfires, and the regime itself degenerates into merely
one of several contending parties, the term is “civil war.” This
verbal analogy to war as between states holds in one circumstance
only—when the collapse of state power gives rise to the same
oppositional symmetry between intra-state parties as normally obtains
between warring states. Anyhow, what’s missing here is the proper
subject of acts of war: the organized coercive power of an opposing
state. Forgive this conceptual pedantry. But in international
terrorism, worldwide and dispersed, far-reaching and decentralized,
and only loosely reticulated, we are encountering a new
phenomenon, which we should not be too quick to assimilate to what we
already know.

Sharon and Putin can feel themselves
encouraged courtesy of Bush, since the latter has thrown all of them
into one pot, as if Al-Qaeda were nothing other than a territorially
bound Partisan terrorist independence or resistence movement (as in
Northern Ireland, Palestine, Chechnya, etc.) . Al-Qaeda is also
different from the terrorist gangs and tribal warriors, the corrupt
war lords of a miscarried decolonization, and also different from
criminal regimes of states making war against their own inhabitants
through ethnic cleansing and genocide, or which support worldwide
terror, e.g., the Taliban. The US administration, with its Iraq war,
has undertaken what is not only illegal, but unfeasible: to substitute
an asymmetrical war between states for the asymmetry between a state
armed with hi-tech weapons, on the one hand, and, on the other, an
elusive terrorist network that, up to now, has worked with knives and
explosives. War between states is asymmetrical when an aggressor aims
at the destruction of a regime, rather than at a conventional defeat,
because their relative strengths are so transparently fixed a priori.
Think of the month-long troop deployment on the borders of Iraq. One
needn’t be a terror expert to recognize that this is no way to destroy
the infrastructure of a network, or to engage Al-Qaeda and its
off-shoots, or to dry up the milieus which nourish such a
group.

Q: Jurists are of the opinion that, according to
classic international law concepts, the jus in bello entails
inherent limitations on the jus ad bellum. Already, the
detailed provisions of the Hague Land War Convention aim at
restraining force, exercised in war, against the civilian population,
against soldiers taken prisoner, against the environment and the
infrastructure of the affected society. The rules for the conduct of
war are also supposed to enable a conclusion of peace acceptable to
all sides. But the monstrous disproportion in technological and
military strength between the United States and its respective
adversaries—in Afghanistan or in Iraq—makes it near impossible to
abide by the jus in bello. Must not the United States be
indicted and prosecuted for war crimes, obviously committed by America
in Iraq, but deliberately ignored by us?

A: Now, the American Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld, in just this connection, waxed proud over the deployment of
precision weapons that were supposed to have kept civilian losses at a
comparatively low level. When I read, in the late edition of the
New York Times of April 10, 2003, a report concerning the Iraqi
war dead, and learned of the regulations pursuant to which Rumsfeld
accepts civilian “casualties,” this alleged precision no longer offers
any consolation: “Air war commanders were required to obtain the
approval of Defense Secretary Donald L. Rumsfeld if any planned air
strike was thought likely to result in deaths of more than 30
civilians. More than 50 such strikes were proposed and all of them
were approved.” I do not know what the International Criminal Court in
The Hague would have to say to this. But given that this court is not
recognized by the USA, and given, also, that no judgment can be
leveled by the Security Council against a member with veto power, the
entire question is going to have to be posed somewhere else.

Careful estimates place the Iraqi dead
at 20,000 altogether. This number, monstrous when compared with their
own losses, throws a spotlight on the moral obscenity that we sense
when we see, on our televisions, the carefully controlled, if not
entirely manipulated, images from this asymmetrical war.This
power asymmetry would take on a different significance if it reflected
not the super-powerfulness and the powerlessness of the warring
parties, but the police power of a world organization.

The United Nations, today, by its
Charter, is already charged with the ensuring of peace and security,
as well as with the worldwide enforcement of human rights
protections. Let us assume, contrary to existing facts, that the
world organization were up to the task. It would be able to fulfill
its functions, then, under the condition that it would wield, uniquely
and non-selectively, sanctions of a daunting superiority
against rule-breaking actors and states. With this, the asymmetry of
power would have assumed a different character.

The infinitely troublesome and still
improbable transformation from idiosyncratic and selective punitive
wars to police actions authorized by international law requires more
than just an impartial tribunal adjudicating adequately-defined
crimes. We also need to develop further the jus in bello into a
law of intervention that will very closely resemble internal police
law, inasmuch as the Hague Land War Convention, which is only directed
to the waging of war, is not tailored to such civil concepts as
obstruction of justice and enforcement of sentences. Because innocent
lives are always at stake in humanitarian interventions, such force as
may be required must be so finely regulated that the declared motives
of a world-police action will lose the odor of pretext, and as such,
be capable of winning worldwide acceptance. A touchstone might be the
moral feelings of global observers – not that sadness and sympathy
could possibly disappear, but rather that spontaneous outrage that
many of us felt at seeing the heavens over Baghdad lit up, obscenely,
week after week, by rocket strikes.

Q: John Rawls envisions the possibility of democratic
“just wars” undertaken against “unlawful states.” But you go further,
and argue that even undoubtedly democratic countries may not arrogate
to themselves the right to wage, at their discretion, war against a
purportedly despotic, peace-threatening or criminal state. In your
Istanbul address, you say that impartial judgments can never be
pleasing to any one side; accordingly, on these cognitive grounds, the
unilateralism of a hegemon, however well-meaning, must necessarily
lack legitimacy: “That the good hegemon has, itself, a democratic
constitution, cannot compensate for this lack.” Has the jus ad
bellum, which made up the core of classical international law,
become obsolete even in the case of the just war?

A: Rawls’ last book, The Law of Peoples, has been
justly criticized because he relaxes the strong principles of justice,
which a democratic constitution must embody for dealing with
authoritarian or semi-authoritarian states, and places the
guardianship of these weakened principles in the hands of individual
democratic states. Rawls cites, in this connection, Michael Walzer’s
concurring doctrine on just war. Both regard “justice among nations”
as desirable and possible, but they want to entrust the enforcement of
international justice, in specific cases, to the judgment and
discretion of sovereign states. Rawls thus seems to be thinking with
Kant rather than with the liberal avant garde of the international
community; Walzer, with the respective participating nations,
completely independently of their internal constitutions. Unlike
Rawls, with Walzer there is a mistrust of supranational operations and
organizations that is motivated by communitarian considerations.
Protecting the integrity of the way of life and established ethos of a
nation state, so long as it doesn’t encompass genocide and crimes
against humanity, should enjoy precedence over the global enforcement
of abstract principles of justice. The considerations referred to in
your question are better illustrated by Walzer’s conception than by
Rawls’ half-hearted defense of international law.

Since the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928,
wars of aggression have been proscribed by international law. The
exercise of military force is to be permitted only for self-defense.
Thus the jus ad bellum, as understood by classical
international law, was abolished. Because the institutions of the
League of Nations, founded after the First World War, proved to be too
weak, the United Nations, after the Second World War, was vested with
authority to conduct peacekeeping operations and to impose sanctions,
although at the price of a veto for the then-great powers. The UN
Charter stipulates the precedence of international law over the legal
systems of the several nations. The coupling of the Charter with the
Declaration of Human Rights, and the wide-ranging authority which the
Security Council enjoys under Chapter VII, have set off a wave of
legal innovations which—though, since 1989, they have remained an
unutilized “fleet in being”—have been correctly understood as a
“constitutionalizing of international law.” The world organization,
which, meanwhile, comprises 192 member states, has a veritable
constitution, which sets forth the procedures according to which
international breaches of the rules can be determined and punished.
There have been, since, no more just and unjust wars, only legal or
illegal ones, justified or unjustified under international law.

One must bear in mind this enormous
advance in the rights revolution in order to realize the radical
breach that the Bush administration has wrought—as much with a defense
doctrine which willfully ignores the applicable legal preconditions
for the exercise of military force, as with its ultimatum to the
Security Council that it either give its blessing to the United
States’ aggressive Iraq policy, or sink into meaninglessness. In the
rhetoric of legitimation, there is in no “realistic” redemption of
“idealistic” notions. To the extent that Bush wanted to eliminate an
unjust system and democratize the region of the Middle East, these
normative goals were not contrary to the program of the United
Nations. In dispute was not the question whether justice between
nations was actually possible, but only as to the means for its
accomplishment. The Bush administration, with moralistic phrases ad
acta, has laid aside the 220-year-old Kantian project for the
legalizing of international relations.

The comportment of the American
administration allows for only one conclusion, that, as they see it,
international law is finished as a medium for the resolution of
conflicts between states, and for the advancement of democracy and
human rights. These goals, the world power has made the official
centerpiece of a policy that no longer relies on law, but rather on
its own ethical values and moral convictions: it has substituted its
own normative rationales for prescribed juristic procedures. But the
one cannot substitute for the other. The abstention from legal
argumentation always betokens an abandonment of previously recognized
general norms. From the restricted vantage point of its own political
culture and its own understanding of the world and of itself, even the
most thoughtful and best-intentioned hegemon cannot be certain if it
is understanding and considering the situation and interests of the
other parties. This goes for the citizens of a democratic superpower
as well as for its political leadership. Without inclusive legal
procedures, which embrace all the parties involved, and contain their
conflicting perspectives, there is nothing compelling the predominant
party to give up the central perspective of a great empire, or to
engage in the de-centering of meaning-perspectives that an equal
consideration for the cognitive point of view of all interests
requires.

Also, an ultra-modern power like the
US relapses into the pseudo-universalism of the ancient empires when,
on questions of international justice, it substitutes morality and
ethics for positive law. From Bush’s perspective, “our” values are the
universally valid values which all other nations should accept in
their best interests. This pseudo-universalism is part of an
all-encompassing ethnocentrism. And a theory of just war, deriving
from theological and natural law traditions, has nothing to set
against this, even when it appears, as today, in communitarian garb. I
am not saying that the official rationales of the American
administration for the Iraq war, or that the officially expressed
religious convictions of the American president concerning “the good”
and “the evil-doers” satisfy the Walzerian criteria for a “just war.”
Walzer-the-political-commentator has left nobody in the dark on this
score. But Walzer-the-philosopher has extracted his criteria,
reasonable as they may be, solely from moral principles and ethical
considerations, outside the framework of a theory of law which ties
judgments on war and peace to inclusive and impartial procedures for
the generation and application of mandatory norms.

In this context, what interests me is
only one consequence of such an approach, namely, that the criteria
for judging just wars is not being translated into a matrix of law.
But only by doing so are the ever-controversial elements of “justice”
translated into the verifiable category of “legality” as regards to
war. Walzer’s criteria for just wars, even if they can be found in
international customary law, are essentially ethical and political in
nature. Review of their application in particular cases is withdrawn
from international courts of law, and reserved rather more to the
sagacity and sense of justice of individual states.

But why should the impartial
adjudication of conflicts within the medium of law be assured only
within states? Why should not the same be brought to bear, judicially,
on international conflicts? This is not trivial. Who is to determine,
on the supra-national level, if “our” values truly merit universal
acceptance, or if we are truly exercising universally recognized
principles, or whether we are perceiving a conflict situation truly
non-selectively, for example, or whether, instead, we are taking into
consideration only what is relevant to us? This is the whole point of
inclusive legal procedures which condition supra-national
decision-making upon the adoption of reciprocating points of view and
consideration of reciprocal interests.

Q: Though you cherish your Kantian project, are you
not, on its behalf, acting like an advocate for a “military humanism?”

A: I am not familiar with the precise context of the
expression, but I imagine that it is alluding to the danger of a
moralizing of antagonism. It’s precisely on the international plane
that a demonizing of adversaries—think of the “axis of evil”—cannot
contribute to conflict resolution. On every side today, fundamentalism
is growing, making conflicts incurable—in Iraq, in Israel and
elsewhere. Carl Schmitt, incidently, also made this argument his whole
life long in defense of a “non-discriminatory concept of war.”
Classical international law, he argued, had regarded war as needing no
further justification than as a legitimate means to resolving
conflicts between states, and, at the same time, as an important
condition for the civilizing of warlike disputes. With the
criminalization of aggressive wars, introduced with the Versailles
Treaty, war itself was made a crime, unleashing a dynamic of
“limit-lifting” as the adversary, adjudged morally, metamorphosed into
a despicable enemy, who is to be annihilated. If, in the train of this
moralizing, one opponent can no longer regard the other as a worthy
adversary—as a justus hostis—limited wars degenerate into total
wars.

Now, as total war dates from the time
of nationalistic mass-mobilizations and the development of weapons of
mass destruction, this argument is not wrong. It only lends support to
my thesis, that “justice between nations” cannot be achieved through
moralizing, but only through the legalizing of international
relations. Discriminating judgment only contributes to strife, as when
one party presumes to pass judgment— according to its own standards—upon
the alleged crimes of the other party. We must not confuse this kind
of subjective judgment with a judicial condemnation of a proven
criminal regime and its henchmen by a forum constituted by the
community of nations, for the latter extends the protection of the law
to an accused party, to whom the presumption of innocence applies.

Admittedly, this distinction between
moralizing and the legalizing of international relations would not
have satisfied Carl Schmitt; for him and his Fascist-minded comrades,
the existential struggle of life and death possessed a weird
vitalistic aura. Hence, it was Schmitt’s opinion that the substance of
the political, the self-asserting of the identity of a Volk or
of a movement, will not let itself be tamed by norms, that every
attempt at domestication through law, must accrue to moral savagery.
Were the pacifism of law to triumph, we would be robbing ourselves of
the essential means to the renewal of authentic being. But we need not
concern ourselves further with this abstruse conception of the
political.

We do need to concern ourselves with
the purportedly “realistic” propositions, asserted by Hobbesians of
the left and of the right, that the law, even in the modern guise
assumed in constitutional democracies, is never anything but the
reflex and mask of economic or political power. On this assumption,
legal pacifism, which seeks to extend law to the international state
of nature, is a sheer illusion. Actually, the Kantian project of
constitutionalizing international law sustains itself by an idealism
that is free of illusions. The form of modern law has, as such, a
clearly moral core which makes it a “gentle civilizer” (Koskenniemi)
in the long run, whenever law comes to be the medium through which a
constitution is formed.

The egalitarian universalism, which is
immanent in law and its procedures, has, as an empirical matter,
perceptibly left its mark on the political and social reality of the
West. The idea of equal treatment, in which the law of peoples as of
states has such an investment, can fulfill its ideological function
only at the price of serving, at the same time, as the standard for
ideological critique. Therefore, opposition and liberation movements
throughout the world have access to the vocabulary of human rights.
And as soon as these movements serve oppression and exclusion, the
rhetoric of human rights may be trusted to oppose this abuse.

Q: Precisely as a defender of the Kantian project
second to none, you must be deeply disappointed by the Machiavellian
machinations that so often dominate the practice in the United
Nations. You yourself have called attention to, and addressed the
“monstrous selectivity” of the Security Council in making up its
agenda. You speak of the “shameless precedence which national
interests always enjoy over global responsibilities.” How must the
institutions of the United Nations be altered and reformed, so that,
from a shield for the prosecution of pro-Western interests and goals,
it may truly become an effective tool for the securing of peace?

A: That’s a big topic. It isn’t a question of
institutional reform. Some change in the power relationship of a
reasonably composed Security Council, as well as some restriction of
the veto right of the great powers, certainly are necessary, but don’t
reach far enough. Let me single out a couple of aspects of this
unwieldy complex.

The world organization is, quite
properly, invested in full inclusiveness. It stands open to all
nations who commit themselves to the words of the UN Charter
and of its Declarations, which are bound up with international
law—irrespective of how remotely its own internal practices
actually accord with these principles. Thus, measured by its own
founding principles, there exists—despite the formal equality of
members—a fall off in legitimacy between liberal, semi-authoritarian,
and sometimes even despotic member states. This becomes conspicuous
when, to pick an example, a country like Libya assumes the
chairmanship of the Human Rights Commission. John Rawls deserves
credit for having pointed to the fundamental problem of graduated
legitimation. The head-start which democratic countries have in regard
to legitimation, upon which Kant had already fixed his hopes, hardly
lends itself to formalizing. But those who would take account of it,
can develop habits and practices. From this perspective as well, the
needed reform of the veto of the permanent Security Council members,
is important.

The most pressing problem, of course,
is the restricted capacity to act of a world organization which has no
monopoly of force, and is dependent on the ad hoc support of more
potent members in particular cases of intervention and nation
building. The problem, however, does not lie in the lack of a monopoly
of force—the differentiation of basic law from executive state force,
we have also seen elsewhere, for example, in the European Union, where
EU law infringes national law, while the nation states still exercise
command over the standing means of the legitimate resort to force. The
United Nations suffers, apart from its want of funds, above all from a
dependency on governments which, for their part, not only pursue their
national interests, but are themselves dependent on the assent of
their respective publics. Until the self-conception of member states
changes, whose social-cognitive understanding of themselves is still
as sovereign actors, we must think about how a relative uncoupling of
levels of decision-making can be achieved. The member states could,
for example, without restraining their national legal rights over the
disposal of their military forces, hold a designated contingent
expressly available for UN purposes.

The ambitious goal of a world domestic
politics without a world government will remain, realistically, only
an aspiration, if the world organization confines itself to its two
most important functions—maintaining peace and the global enforcement
of human rights, and hands over political coordination in the areas of
the economy, the environment, transportation, health, etc., to
mid-level institutions and frameworks for negotiations. But this
plane, upon which global players with capacity and scope of action can
hammer out compromises, belongs, so far, to only particular
institutions such as the World Trade Organization. The kind of
felicitous reform I envision for the United Nations cannot be effected
if the nation states in the various parts of the world do not
integrate in continental governments after the model of the European
Union. This would make for a modest beginning. Here—not in the reform
of the UN—lies the properly Utopian element of the status of world
citizenship.

On the basis of a division of labor
within such a multi-level global system, the legitimation needs of a
UN capable o f action, in even a halfway-democratic manner, might
actually be met. A world public has formed, up to now, only
intermittently, for major historical events, like September 11. Thanks
to the electronic media and the astounding success of non-governmental
organizations operating world wide, such as Amnesty International or
Human Rights Watch, these may some day assume a firmer infrastructure
and attain a greater continuity. In such circumstances, the idea of
establishing a “second chamber” alongside of the General Assembly, a
“parliament of world citizens” (David Held) would no longer be absurd,
or, barring that, at the least an expansion of the existing chamber to
include the representation of citizens. Thus would an evolution in
international law, which has been long in the works, find its symbolic
expression and institutional fulfillment. Meanwhile, it would not only
be states, but also citizens themselves, who would be the subjects of
international law: As world citizens, they could, if necessary, assert
legal claims against their own governments.

Of course, an idea as abstract as a
parliament of world citizens will easily give rise to humbug. But in
view of the limited functions of the United Nations, one must keep in
mind that representatives in this parliament would be representing
populations which of necessity would not be bound together, like the
citizens of a political entity, by thick traditions. In place of the
positive solidarity of a national citizenry, a negative consensus
would suffice, to wit: a common outrage at the aggressive warmongering
and human rights violations of criminal gangs and regimes, or a common
horror over acts of ethnic cleansing and of genocide.

Admittedly, the resistance and
reactions to be overcome along the way to full constitutionalization
will be so great that the project can only succeed if the USA, as in
1945, takes it on itself to be the locomotive at the forefront of the
movement. This is not as improbable as, it appears at the moment. For
one thing, it is a lucky accident of world history that the sole
superpower is the oldest democracy on earth, and hence, contrary to
what Kagan would have us believe, has, so to speak, innate affinities
with the Kantian idea of the legalizing of international relations.
For another, it is in the interest of the United States of America
itself to make the UN capable of action before another, less
democratic, great power rises to superpower status. Empires come and
go. In the end, the European Union has agreed, just now, on countering
the international law-breaking “pre-emptive strike” with a “preventive
engagement,” on principles of security and defense policy; it might be
able to exercise influence on public opinion in our American ally.

Q: The contempt of the American administration for
international law and international treaties, the brutal exercise of
military force, a politics of lies and blackmail has provoked an
anti-Americanism which has extended to our own current government, and
not without justification. How should Europe deal with this spreading
animus so as to prevent worldwide anti-Americanism from swamping the
West altogether in its wake?

A: Anti-Americanism is a danger in Europe itself. In
Germany, it has always been associated with the reactionary movements.
Thus, it is important for us, as in the time of the Vietnam War, to be
able to make common cause, side by side, with an American domestic
opposition, against the policy of the American government. If we can
relate ourselves to a protest movement inside the United States, the
counter-productive reproach leveled against us of anti-Americanism is
shown to be empty. The anti-modern emotion directed against the
Western world as a whole, is another matter. In this regard,
self-critique is appropriate—let us say, a self-critical defense of
the achievements of Western modernity, which signalizes openness and
willingness to learn, and above all dissolves the idiotic equation of
democratic order and liberal society with unbridled capitalism. We
must, on the one hand, clearly and unmistakably draw the line against
fundamentalism, including Christian and Jewish fundamentalism, and, on
the other hand, we must face up to the fact that fundamentalism is the
child of a deracinating modernization, in which the derailments of our
colonial history and the failures of decolonization have played a
decisive role. As against fundamentalist self-quarantine, we can, in
all events, show that the legitimate critique of the West borrows its
standard from the West’s own 200-year-old discourse of
self-criticism.

Q: Two political itineraries have lately ended up in
the shredder of war and terrorism: The so-called “road map” that was
supposed to lead to peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians,
and the imperialist scenario of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Bush. The
scenario for the conflict in Israel was supposed to be written
together with the scenario for the reconstruction of the entire Middle
East. But the policies of the United States have fused
anti-Americanism with antisemitism. Anti-Americanism today is feeding
old forms of murderous antisemitism. How can we defuse this explosive
compound?

A: This is a problem, particularly in Germany, where, at
the moment, the floodgates of a narcissistic preoccupation with its own
victims are opening, and, supported by official opinion, seeking a
hearing and legitimacy, breaking through decades of—quite
necessary—censorship. But we will be able to cope with that mixture,
which you so rightly described, if the legitimate job of criticizing
Bush’s fatal vision of a world order can succeed in keeping itself
convincingly free of every admixture of anti-Americanism. As soon as the
other America once again assumes discernible contours, it will
also pull the ground out from under that anti-Americanism which serves
only as a cover for anti-Semitism.

This interview
was conducted by Eduardo Mendieta (Dept. of Philosophy, SUNY Stony
Brook) and was translated from the German by Jeffrey Craig Miller.